


In Spirit, In Flesh

by CSHfic, VSfic



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Assassination Attempt(s), Azula (Avatar) Redemption, Bodyswap, Brief appearance of more of the gaang at the end, Conspiracy, Established Relationship, Fire Lord Zuko, Fire Nation (Avatar), Fire Nation Politics (Avatar), Gratuitous use of spirit world nonsense, Hurt Sokka (Avatar), Hurt Zuko (Avatar), Hurt/Comfort, M/M, New Ozai Society, Post-Canon, Post-War, Spirit World (Avatar)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-10
Updated: 2020-07-15
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:34:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 17,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25176994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CSHfic/pseuds/CSHfic, https://archiveofourown.org/users/VSfic/pseuds/VSfic
Summary: Zuko's body is stolen as part of a treasonous plot for the throne. Unfortunately for the impostor, the Fire Lord's relationship with the ambassador to the Southern Water Tribe is very different behind closed doors. Things get complicated.
Relationships: Azula & Zuko (Avatar), Sokka/Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 250
Kudos: 2155
Collections: A:tla, Azula’s Redemption





	1. The Fire Lord is Not Your Friend

**Author's Note:**

> This is gonna steal a little bit from the comics, but mostly just treat it as it's own thing :)

Zuko was shivering.

No, he was _freezing_. He didn’t think he’d been this cold since he and Sokka had visited the South Pole. Something about that didn’t make sense, but everything felt slippery and distant, and it took him several long second of lying there shaking through the vague nausea rolling in his stomach to remember—he was in the Fire Nation, and it was… it was autumn, but it shouldn’t be that cold yet, and it never really got _cold_ in the Fire Nation anyway, not like in the South Pole, but his skin felt like ice and he couldn’t stop shivering. He was supposed to be gone for a day or two, at most, back in Caldera City in time to sit down with the harvest reports before his scheduled meeting with the Minister of Agriculture. He certainly wasn’t gone long enough for the weather to turn…

Zuko remembered the carriage, reading through his letters by his own tiny firelight in the darkened cab. He’d been on his way home. He remembered stopping. Calling out to the driver, and the prickling unease of receiving no response. Pinching the heavy curtain between two fingers, drawing it back, and… then what? His head was pounding. 

Eyes closed against the too-bright lights, Zuko pressed a hand to his chest, took a measured breath, and felt—

—nothing?

He’d never sat up so fast in his life, gasping against the frost creeping beneath his ribs. A riot of colors sparked across his vision, and he groaned and rolled and pressed his face into the cold stone floor. The room was spinning, and he… he was pretty sure he was going to throw up, and he breathed and breathed but his chest was cold, his fire wasn’t working, it wasn’t _there_ , why—

Someone was laughing at him. 

Zuko pushed himself up onto his hands. He dared to crack his eyes open, and this time the light didn’t dazzle him quite as much. His vision swam. He was in… a store room of some kind, only not quite, because no one needed such heavy bars to protect a few lousy sacks of flour. There was a man sitting on the other side of the bars. He could see his boots, propped up on one of the crates, even as he blinked and tried to get his vision to stop tilting so much.

“What...” he tried, but his voice came out rough and wrong. He coughed and tried to clear it, tried again, but still he sounded strange to his own ears, “What did you do to me?”

“See for yourself,” a voice said. _His_ voice said. Zuko’s eyes widened, both eyes, and he could see clearly as he turned his head fully and saw—himself.

Zuko stared at what was undeniably _him_ , his body, dressed in his Fire Lord’s travel robes, crown on his head, hair done up in the half-up, half-down style he favored. And that was his scar, and his keen gaze, and when his body tilted its head at him and turned up the corner of its mouth, that was his smirk twisting his mouth. The man, the doppelganger, whatever it was, eyed him like a cat might watch a sparrowkeet cage, certain he was trapped, but interested to see how he might flutter against the bars.

“What—?” Zuko croaked.

His body rolled an object between his fingers. It was smooth, pearescently shiny, but it glowed faintly from within like a smouldering coal. He held it up to his eye as though to peer through it, and it cast a faint black glow across the relief of his scarred cheek. Sweat beaded on the nape of Zuko’s neck. Just glancing at that strange glow stirred some deep anxiety in him, heavy like all the unsettling stillness of a too-quiet dusk pressed into one cat’s eye jewel. 

“What is that?” Zuko asked, strangely breathless.

“You’d be surprised by the sort of interesting gifts that the Spirit World has to offer, for someone… sufficiently motivated,” his body said.

He tilted the little sphere, just slightly, and the light caught it just right, so that when he angled his gaze though the bars his reflection shimmered across its glassy surface. 

His face was not his face. 

Zuko flinched back, and the man laughed again. 

Where the bead should have shown his own reflection, he saw a stranger, eyes-wide with the same creeping panic clutching at his chest. But, no… that face was not quite a stranger’s face. He blinked at it and realized with a dawning horror why it looked so familiar. 

He’d met the man before, years ago, when General Kuryu was still his advisor. Back before the New Ozai Society had made the first attempt on his life, and the light had shined on them. Before the general and several other traitors had been arrested, sending the rest of the New Ozai sympathizers scattering like rat-roaches into dark corners, to splinter into the violent cells he’d been dealing with all these years since. 

General Kuryu had a son, Zuko thought. 

His name… what was his name?

“Rosan,” Zuko said. 

His own face raised an eyebrow at him, looking vaguely impressed. “You remember me,” he said. “Sorry to say, I haven’t got time to stay and catch up. I have important duties to see to, being the Fire Lord and all.”

A dawning dread crept over him, cold and tight in his chest. He was going to take Zuko’s face, and infiltrate the palace. He was going to try to imitate him, and take the throne, and—what? Restore the customs and policies from Ozai’s reign, and return the palace to the old ways? He didn’t know what they were planning. Zuko felt the fear rising in his throat, and he knew that Rosan saw it on his face, because his smirk turned cruel. 

He thought Zuko was afraid that his plan would work. 

Zuko was afraid because he knew that it wouldn’t.

He might be able to fool the servants, and the advisors. Even if he didn’t try to fake through Zuko’s personality, if he surrounded himself with enough Ozai sympathizers to secretly back him, and used his authority as the Fire Lord to avoid anyone looking too closely, he might be able to go unquestioned. 

Except Rosan was expecting the sort of arm’s length distance of the nobility, and the royal advisors, and the servants. He was expecting to slide by undetected with the position of Fire Lord as a shield. And his plan wouldn’t work, because the second he turned and gave the same stiff and formal treatment to the ambassador to the Southern Water Tribe, Sokka was going to _know_.

Sokka was going to shamelessly let himself into Zuko’s chambers with the same casual attitude he always did, and he was going to find this man wearing Zuko’s face, who had no way to know that their relationship in private was long past the casual friendship they’d been presenting to the palace staff and the nobility for the last year and a half. Sokka was going to know right away that something was wrong, and then—

Fear clenched into something hard and vicious in his chest. He swore, he thrust his fist forward as though to shoot a stream of flame through the bars. No flame came, not even smoke. His chest was cold and hollow.

Rosan clucked his tongue. 

“I’m not a firebender,” Rosan said. He took a breath, flicked his wrist, and called a small flame to his hand. He closed his fist to crush the flame in his palm. “Well. I wasn’t.”

“Why are you doing this?” Zuko asked. 

“Come now, _my Lord_ ,” he said, spitting the words like they were foul on his tongue. “You know why.”

The New Ozai Society hated him, hated everything he stood for and every way he’d tried to change the Fire Nation for the better. 

“Why not kill me and be done with it, then?” he asked. “Why this?”

“Because killing you is not enough,” he said. “Because where others have sought to kill you I will right the wrong of your birth—” Agni help him, he was crazy, “—and restore not just Ozai’s line but his _will_ to the throne.” 

...Ozai’s line? His will?

Shit. 

Zuko thought of the estate to the north of Caldera City, which sat empty until only recently, whose quiet outer walls did nothing to warn of the chaos inside. Where was his sister now? Still there, he thought, he _hoped_ , and found that the idea of it sunk like a stone. 

“Leave Azula alone,” he said, frustrated with the edge of desperation that crept into his voice. She—she’d been doing better, she hadn’t been back to the hospital in months, she didn’t need this man who wasn’t her brother trying to put ideas into her head—

Rosan laughed mirthlessly and shook his head. He turned on his heel and sighed heavily like he was shaking off the weight of a long day of work. 

“Well, I’m off. Take good care of my body for me,” Rosan said. He paused with his hand on the doorknob, tilted his head, and shrugged. “Or don’t. I don’t have much need for it anymore.”

The heavy slide of a bolt followed him out, and then the sound of Rosan ascending the stairs into whatever their hideout held beyond the cellar they’d dragged him to, leaving him alone in the stifling darkness.

The muffled sounds of voices carried through the floor for nearly half an hour after Zuko’s body had gone, followed by the shuffling and banging of many hands working quickly. They were packing, Zuko thought. 

His body felt strange and uncoordinated. It was nearly pitch black, with no windows and no source of light beyond the thinnest sliver of cast off glow that peeked beneath the bolted door. It took him an embarrassingly long time to find his feet, leaning heavily on the wall for support. He still felt like he was freezing, but… that was probably in his head, at least partly. This body wasn’t able to firebend. Its natural body temperature was colder than he was used to, and lying on the cold floor hadn’t helped him. He pressed his hand to his chest and breathed to steady himself, even though he knew the fire wasn’t there. 

He tried the cell door, even though he knew it would be locked. It was hard to tell in the dark, but when he reached through the bars he could feel the outline of where a key might fit. He threw his weight against the other bars, but they were all well maintained and tightly joined to the floor. The back wall of the cell was smooth, no covered windows or loose bricks. 

They’d stacked a tower of supplies up against the wall with the door. Clearly they’d been storing their supplies here, rice and flour and tins of meat and vegetables like the kinds that were sent in disaster relief packages, all Fire Nation, but cobbled together from a variety of sources like they’d been squirrel-ratting it away for a while. 

The footsteps upstairs had quieted. 

Zuko eyed the stacks of supplies, the edges where they’d spilled over the too-cramped space. If he stretched on his stomach and reached through the bars, he might just be able to catch the corner of one of those sacks...

Zuko waited with his eyes carefully closed, kneeling a half-step from the bars. Every so often he traced the quiet creak of the floorboards as someone made their rounds. His worry for Sokka had settled somewhere heavy in the back of his mind, but he pressed that fear back and forced himself to stay calm. He didn’t have his fire, but the act of meditating still helped. It was impossible to track time in the dark cellar. He couldn’t afford to be impatient, not when he had to make this one chance count. He relaxed, aside from the fist clenched tightly in his lap. Breathed. 

Minutes or hours later, something thumped above him. A hinge groaned, and the stairs beyond the door creaked. Someone was coming.

The door opened. The light dazzled even through his closed eyelids, and Zuko waited a long moment before he finally blinked to glare at his captors. There were two of them, the broad shoulders of the first blocking the other in the narrow doorway. The man in front was carrying a plate, heaped with rice and komodo chicken and greens. It was generous, more generous than he’d have expected as a prisoner, but then again, Zuko _was_ in their comrade’s body, so maybe they felt some duty to keep it healthy on the man’s behalf. Beyond them he could see the short hall that led to a creaking stairwell, and the door to the root cellar above them, closed tightly behind them. 

He couldn’t hear any other footsteps on the floor above, but that didn’t mean the men were alone. Zuko waited, and eyed the saber on the man’s belt. Not Zuko’s first choice, but it would do. 

“Lunch time,” the man said.

How many hours had passed since Rosan had left with his body? Since his caravan had been attacked? When Zuko returned to the palace, Sokka was going to come looking for him. He’d probably wait until the evening, at least, maybe even until Zuko had retired to his chambers. He’d probably be wondering why Zuko hadn’t come to greet him when he first arrived, because of course Rosan wouldn’t think for a moment that he needed to. How much longer did he have until then? A few hours, at most.

Zuko made no move to take the food. He said nothing. Glared. 

“Are you going to eat it, or are we going to have to force you?” the man asked. 

The man behind him looked uncomfortable. Zuko wondered if it was because he didn’t have the stomach for it. He took a steadying breath and closed his eyes again, as though done with the conversation. The man grumbled, irritated, but Zuko still heard the shift of his boots as he came forward. He projected calm. Non-threatening. 

Easy to underestimate. 

The plate clinked faintly against one of the bars as he slid it inside the cell. 

Zuko shot forward and seized the man by the wrist before he’d even opened his eyes, and before he could shout in surprise he hauled him forward with all his weight and slammed his face against the bars. The other man yelped and moved to draw his own blade, and with the first man dazed Zuko twisted and flung the fistful of flour he’d clenched in his palm in the second man’s face. He cursed, and staggered back, blinded.

The plate of food clattered loudly against the ground. Zuko twisted the man’s arm and dragged him further through the bars, elbow half-planted in the mess of rice on the floor, and seized his sword. The man bit out a curse that turned more into a pained grunt as Zuko pinned the man’s arm with his knee and reached over his back to grab the keys from his pocket. 

The other man was still scrubbing the flour from his eyes, but he went very, very still when the lock on the cell door clicked. 

No, Zuko thought, as he flipped the blade in his palm. He definitely did not have the stomach for this. 

It was half a day’s journey to Caldera City. Rosan was likely already there, or near arriving, slipping into the palace like an armadillo-wolf in the fold. Zuko tugged his stolen cloak tighter, turned for the trade-roads where the merchant carts trundled along their tracks, and prayed they would be fast enough. 

Dusk slipped into full night as the cart rounded the final leg of the road leading toward Caldera City. Zuko eyed the glowing smudge of it in the distance as the street lamps began to wink on in the darkness. Something about the walls looked off, though he couldn’t immediately place why. Zuko slipped from where he’d stowed away for the journey, smoothing the evidence of his presence out of the thick straw he’d been resting on. He cut through the ditch and disappeared into the trees growing alongside the lonely trade road. 

By the time the cart had reached the gates he could see what had put him on edge. The fires in all the towers were blaring, not just the one inside the gatehouse where the night shift was greeting travelers as they entered and exited the city. 

Caldera City was on lockdown. 

Did they know he was coming? It was possible. Zuko tried to count the number of guards patrolling the walls, but soon gave up. The men at the gate dragged the cart owner down from his seat, pulled him around to search through the back of the cart. Zuko spared them a few measured glances as they searched the man’s wares, tearing the lids off the crates, sweeping the loose hay used to pack the goods out onto the ground to search beneath. Mostly, Zuko watched the wall. 

Twenty minutes of watching passed. Zuko nodded to himself, took a steadying breath, and slipped from his hiding place. He was up and over the wall in moments, the sounds of the cart owner angrily hammering the lid back onto his crates thumping behind them. 

This body was taller. His fingers caught the ledge easily. This body was stronger too, and heavier. He rolled over the top, crouched low, and waited for the tower guard’s gaze to sweep right, searching out over the trees in the same predictable rhythm. This body was clumsier. His left foot caught on the ledge as he went over the other side. The quiet scrape against the stone seemed deafeningly loud to this body’s unmangled ear, and when he turned over his shoulder with his new perfectly working eye, he thought he saw the tower guard stall, his head swing around—

Zuko dropped onto the street below and disappeared between one blink and the next. 

The streets near the walls were full of tense people moving with urgency, heads down and fists close to their sides as they walked. It seemed that every street corner held another guard. Zuko avoided them carefully as he picked his way further into the Caldera downtown, drawing closer to the palace. It did not take long, among the nightlife throngs spilling out of the restaurants and winehouses, to find what he was looking for. 

Zuko heard his own name and paused on the corner, posed under the winehouse awning like he had stopped to have a smoke, and listened to the hushed whispers drifting through the cracked window. 

“—hate to say it, but you’d think the Fire Lord would be used to it by now,” a woman said, slurring and wine drunk. “Lots of people try to kill him. No reason to ruin my evening, shutting down the whole damn city every time—”

“Not this time. This is—something else,” her companion said. 

“Oh?” she asked. 

“I heard they arrested the ambassador to the Southern Water Tribe,” the man said, “for trying to stab Fire Lord Zuko in his sleep.”

Zuko went cold, an icy hand gripping his heart like a vise. It took everything in him to stand still and _breathe_.

“What?” she hissed, sounding much more sober, and much more alarmed, “I thought they were friends—”

Zuko pushed away from the wall. He stumbled, barely, limbs feeling strangely numb, and then he forced himself to take one ragged breath. He needed to _calm down_ , he needed to—

There was another guard at the end of the road, looking at him strangely. He couldn’t afford to panic now. Zuko forced himself to walk, calmly, around the corner, and not look back. 

He was two blocks down, clamoring over a low stone wall into a side garden, before he realized where he was going. He crept the rest of the way to the Southern Water Tribe embassy, outside the palace but not quite inside the Caldera downtown. He had to slow down as he got closer, the quiet tension of the street tight like a coiled spring. By the time he could see the outer gates, the streets were empty. Every room inside the embassy was dark, as though they had all gone to sleep the moment the night had set in. Zuko saw it for what it was, though, a more desperately fearful decision—every fire inside the embassy had been preemptively snuffed out. 

Sokka’s staff was probably in a panic by now. Zuko crouched in the shadows and watched the embassy’s shuttered doors. He couldn’t just leave Sokka in the dungeons. For an accusation of high treason, there was really only one natural response from the palace, and Zuko doubted Rosan would be granting any pardons—

Zuko was not going to think about that, because it didn’t matter. He was going to get Sokka out. 

A shadow moved along the embassy lawn, and for a moment Zuko’s breath caught, staring out into the dark. He caught sight of it again when it reached the gate, and he realized with a rush that the person was coming out of the embassy, not trying to sneak inside. He couldn’t see who it was, a cloak too heavy for the heat pulled up over their face as they slipped out into the street and disappeared down an alley. 

Without thinking, Zuko followed. 

For the hundredth time, in a way that would have made her look _incredibly_ suspicious to anyone else watching, the cloaked staffer turned to glance over her shoulder nervously, searching the empty street, and her hood fell open just enough for Zuko to catch a glimpse of her face. Sannen, if he remembered correctly, wasn’t from Sokka’s village, but one of the representatives from a neighboring village in the South. She was one of the younger representatives in the embassy, alongside Sokka himself. 

It took him until she had rounded another corner to realize that she was headed toward the aviary. He swore quietly under his breath. He hesitated, but no, he couldn’t just leave her to her own fate when it was Zuko’s carelessness that had gotten them all into this mess in the first place. He jogged after her. She didn’t hear him coming. 

She did try to scream when he grabbed her shoulder. Zuko clapped a hand over her mouth and dragged her back off the road. 

“Be quiet,” he hissed. “It’s all right.”

She absolutely didn’t believe him, staring at him wild-eyed, but he could see in her expression that she didn’t recognize his face. He glanced back at the street, but the sound of their scuffle didn’t seem to have caught any attention. She nodded, slowly, warily, and he uncovered her mouth.

“You can’t go to the aviary,” he said. “Someone from the palace will be watching.”

She went very rigid, defensive. “I wasn’t—”

“You were,” Zuko said. “But if you try to go to the aviary, you’ll be caught and questioned the second you tell them who the message is for.”

“...How do you know?” Sannen asked. 

Zuko was sure that Rosan had been planning to use his authority as the Fire Lord to keep people at a distance long enough to establish himself. To be discovered after less than a day… he would definitely be panicking, and a panicked enemy usually meant more casualties. With the city on lockdown, he was surely looking to tie up loose ends. 

“Just trust me,” he said. “You need to go back to the embassy. Lock the doors. When the Fire Lord sends someone, you cooperate, and you tell them you want nothing to do with Ambassador Sokka.” She looked aghast at the thought, and tried to protest. He shook her arm. “ _Trust me_ , okay? Wash your hands of him. You don’t want to get involved in this.”

“I can’t just—I have to contact the Southern Water Tribe. And his father…” she said. 

Spirits, help him. Zuko pressed a hand to his mouth. This was—shit, this was going to be messy. He could only imagine what Chief Hakoda was going to think. He could only hope that any damage they did to the Southern Tribe’s trust could be repaired. 

But keeping the Southern Water Tribe in the dark was not worth risking the embassy staff’s safety, even if it would have been easier. She was right. They needed to know. Zuko blew out of breath. 

“Go back to the embassy,” he said. He held up a hand when she tried to interrupt him. “Wait until morning. Go to the markets, just one of you, and find one of the vendors or fishmongers— _not_ a Fire National, if you can help it. Try to find someone with foreign wares. Pay them to take your letter out of the city to send it. And make sure you buy something on the way out, or you’ll look suspicious. If you take your message to the aviary yourself, you’ll be caught.”

“...Why are you helping us?” she asked. 

Zuko didn’t answer that question. He pulled her hood back up over her face and pushed her toward the street. “Just—keep your head down.” She stared at him for a moment before taking a step back, hands clenched indecisively in front of her. Then she nodded and turned. 

“Wait,” Zuko said. He clenched his fists. “I need you to send a second letter. I don’t—I don’t have any money.” She stared at him for a long moment, then nodded. “I don’t have any paper, either. Can you remember—”

“I’ll remember,” she said.

“For the Southern Air temple,” he said. Her expression grew impossibly grave. She knew who it was meant for. He considered his next words carefully, wary of all the potential ways the letter could fall into the wrong hands. “Tell him that the ambassador has been arrested,” he said, knowing that her retelling was going to paint him in a very bad light.

Zuko hesitated. He wanted to warn them about Rosan. Aang was the type of person who saw the best in people, and when he heard what Zuko had done, he would try to… come talk some sense into him, or something equally stupid—but no, he couldn’t explain this in a letter, not when the whole city was on lockdown. Sannen would be in enough trouble if she was caught sending the letters at all. Telling her more would put her in danger. 

“Tell him that the Fire Lord is not his friend right now,” he settled on at last, “and to hurry.” 

Sannen nodded once more with a tense determination in her shoulders, turned back to the empty road, and fled. Zuko allowed himself a moment to lean against the rough brick wall, to stare at the shadow of the palace looming in the distance, and to brace himself for what came next.


	2. No One Else Knows

They were going to need to revisit the palace security. 

Zuko couldn’t hold it entirely against the guards. For one thing, most potential threats did not grow up in the palace. He’d spent years with a very good incentive to learn how to slip unnoticed through the halls, dodge the guards, and dodge the attention of his father and his advisors. He’d memorized all the secret passages, the new and the older chambers long since nailed shut behind false walls.

Most potential threats would not know the guard’s rotations off the top of their heads, either, although that one Zuko was slightly less willing to forgive. Any good reconnaissance would include learning the guard’s shifts—they really ought to have made sure there were no holes in their rotations. It made it all too easy for him to slide through the halls, silent as a ghost, darting out between one turned corner and the next. 

Earlier, he’d stopped just out of sight of the Fire Palace gates, tucked into an alley, and stripped off his cloak. The clothes he’d woken up in were fine, aside from a light dusting of flour and the grit from the road, but he couldn’t risk them being recognized if Rosan knew he was coming. 

He’d followed Sannen back to the embassy, just to make sure she made it safely inside. The night market had thinned out by the time he’d circled back, the streets clearing more and more as the wine houses closed, far more effective at sending people stumbling home than the guard’s patrols could ever hope to be. Still, there were enough people left to be distracting, all loud and drunk, the sort of people the night market vendors kept a keen eye on. 

Zuko had no money, so he’d just helped himself, and made the mental note to come back and pay for everything he’d taken once he was out of this mess. 

He found a change of clothes, a belt and a bag, all dark and simple fabric. The weapon shop had a stall during the day market, but the owner was too proud of his wares to accept the sort of reputation earned by selling weapons under the fire-lit darkness of the night market. The shop was long closed by now. 

The lock was very easy to break. 

Not all of the shop’s weapons were on display, the most valuable likely locked away in the safe. Zuko didn’t need anything fancy. He liberated a simple pair of dual dao, slung a straight sword in its sheath onto his back, and then crept back the way he’d come. He paused in the door, gaze falling on the rack propped against the wall. 

He’d taken Sokka to see _Love Amongst the Dragons_ three weeks ago, when a traveling theatre troupe had swung through the city. Zuko suspected that Sokka hadn’t really enjoyed it, but he’d pretended to like it anyway, because Zuko loved it, which… He shook his head and cleared that line of thought before the tight feeling in his chest could claw any higher. Breathed. 

There were leftover souvenir masks from the show on clearance alongside a bucket of toy swords and a few other odds and ends. 

Well. 

Zuko took one of the Dark Water Spirit masks. It wasn’t quite the same. They’d taken some liberties with the design, but it was… recognizable enough. He’d slipped the mask into his stolen bag, wedged the shop’s door shut around its broken lock, and left to find somewhere private to change. 

The dungeons, carved into the volcanic rock beneath the palace, intertwined with the winding passages of the catacombs and the Fire Lord’s bunker beyond that, were not made to be easily navigated. He had to take a slight detour to find himself a ring of keys, courtesy of a night watch guard who’d barely felt a moment of wide-eyed fear before Zuko had knocked him out. He’d buried the keys inside the pouch of his stolen bag where they wouldn’t clink and give him away, and then he’d started down the first block. 

He passed row by row through the empty dungeon corridors, drifting silently through the too-still rooms as he made his way down. He bit back his frustration at the end of another empty cell block and moved on to the next, silently praying that they hadn’t moved Sokka somewhere else. Would Rosan have risked transferring him to the Capital City Prison? Zuko had to assume no, he wouldn’t want Sokka out of his sight, not when he’d seen Rosan for what he was and might spread rumors. He _had_ to assume no, because if he was wrong and Sokka had been moved then maybe Zuko couldn’t reach him in time, not before Rosan returned to deal with the problem more permanently—

There was a sound down the corridor, the faintest noise of a body shifting in the otherwise empty block. Silent as a spirit, he quickened his pace. 

Zuko sucked in a breath, relief tight in his throat.

Sokka was leaning against the far wall of the cell, dozing with his head tilted against the stone. His hands were loose in his lap, the chain from the manacles on his wrist slack between his knees. He startled awake when Zuko touched the cell door. His eyes widened, a grin threatening to overtake his face when he saw the Blue Spirit mask.

“Zu—” Sokka cut himself off before he could get the word out, when he’d leaned up enough for a better look at him. His face fell. 

Zuko knew this body didn’t look the same. He was taller, obviously broader in the shoulders, built with more muscles and less grace. Behind the mask, his hair was much shorter, hardly able to fit into the tight topknot Rosan had been wearing when they’d traded places. Sokka knew what he looked like, with or without a mask, so of course he recognized immediately that he was a stranger. It still hurt to see the raw disappointment flash across Sokka’s face at the sight of him. 

Sokka resettled, wincing as he leaned forward. He was favoring his right arm slightly. Was he hurt? If he was, it was hidden beneath the loose prisoner’s robe. He eyed him warily. 

“Who are you?” Sokka asked. 

Had Sokka ever met Rosan? Zuko couldn’t remember. He didn’t want to risk him recognizing his voice, or his face, and fighting him when they needed to focus on escaping. He dug the keys out of his bag and began trying each one against the lock. The fourth key worked, and the creak of the cell door echoed unbearably loud down the hall. 

None of the keys fit the lock on the manacles. The keyhole was too small. He turned Sokka’s wrist over when he winced again, hitching up the sleeve of his robe to look. He’d been burned, badly, from his elbow to his wrist. Sokka shook him off and tugged his sleeve down again. 

“It’s fine,” he said. 

It was absolutely _not_ fine. So far as Sokka knew, he’d come to Zuko, and Zuko had _burned_ him, and had him arrested, and—

There was something very tense about the way Sokka was looking at him, carefully serious, carefully holding it together despite being attacked by his boyfriend only hours ago without any explanation. Zuko breathed a harsh breath that would have turned into a tongue of flame in his own body. He took Sokka’s arm gently, above the burn, and helped him to his feet. Then he slung the straight sword down from his back and handed it over.

“Oh good,” Sokka said, clasping his manacled hands together around the hilt. A grim smile tugged his lips. “I’ve been meaning to practice my two-handed forms.”

Zuko let go of his arm once he was sure he could stand on his own two feet, and felt a little colder for it. Sokka looked tired. With a weary resignation dragging his shoulders, he nodded, and Zuko turned to lead the way. 

Retracing his steps back to the surface of the dungeon was faster, now that he didn’t have to wind his way through every corridor. Sokka’s footsteps were so quiet behind him, more than once he found himself glancing back just to be sure he was still there. Every time Sokka’s gaze was fixed on him, intense and thoughtful. Zuko hated it. It was the look he’d give a stranger, distantly wary and without any of the warmth that Zuko had grown to cherish in the private looks Sokka usually shared with him.

As they rounded the last bend, just before the dungeon opened into the hidden passages spidering beneath the palace, Sokka hesitated. 

“Not to look a gift ostrich-horse in the mouth,” Sokka whispered. “But I’m honestly not sure how I feel about you being so willing to break me out of here.”

Zuko spared him a silent glance over his shoulder. 

“I mean, they’re saying I tried to stab Zu—ah, Fire Lord Zuko—in his sleep, right? You didn’t even ask me if I’d done it,” Sokka said. 

Zuko snorted, because the idea was just… ridiculous. Of course Sokka hadn’t. For one thing, he couldn’t even imagine Sokka trying to hurt him, which... which was really a welcome change, to his usual, and the list of people he trusted so unconditionally was _short_ , sure, but Sokka had long since earned his place on it. Anyway, even if Sokka had realized that the man pretending to be Zuko wasn’t him, hell, even if he _did_ want to murder Zuko, he would never sink so low as to stab him in his sleep.

“You think I’m innocent?” he asked. Zuko nodded, and Sokka sighed, looking equal parts relieved and surprised. “Well. Good. I was getting a little worried that you were breaking me out because you thought I was some kind of nationalist sympathizer, and I wasn’t really looking forward to that conversati—mmph!”

Zuko clapped a hand over Sokka’s mouth and shoved him back into one of the shadowed alcoves lining the corridor. At the end of the hall, two guards passed, walking slowly around the bend. More of the night rounds, probably. He strained to see them in the dark, but couldn’t quite make out their faces at this distance, so he couldn’t be sure if he knew them personally. He glanced at Sokka, who was craning his neck to try to get a better look at them, too.

Suddenly Sokka stiffened, and at the same time the telling clip of boots echoed down the corridor. They were coming this way. Zuko pressed them both further back into the shadows. 

“When they come around the turn,” Sokka whispered, breath hot against Zuko’s ear.

Zuko leapt from his hiding place the moment they were within range. He slammed his shoulder into the first guard, knocking him off balance. Zuko swept his foot and sent him sprawling on the ground, and then he spun in time to see Sokka parry a blow from the second as he tried to draw his sword. 

“He’s escaping,” the one on the ground gasped. “Warn the Fire Lord—”

The man on the ground was in no position to fight. Zuko knocked the sword from his hands easily and sent it ringing down the corridor where it came to rest at the junction of the hall. The other tried to run, but Zuko stayed his blades and grabbed for him instead. He stumbled as Sokka deftly disarmed him of his own weapon. The man was undeterred, bracing back into a firebender’s stance. 

Zuko spun his blades and deflected the fire to either side of the corridor, leaving blackened streaks in the wake of each strike. He pressed forward to the right, and Sokka to the left, and together they cut past the jet of flames broiling the corridor and swept the man off his feet. 

Zuko didn’t want to hurt them. They were doing their jobs, and as far as they knew Sokka had tried to kill the Fire Lord. They were loyal, and Zuko… Zuko didn’t know how he felt about that, because they were so clearly in the wrong in his eyes, and yet there was such a fine line between questioning the Fire Lord’s judgement and undermining him. That they trusted him so much that they were willing to believe without question that a man like Sokka had tried to murder him was—dangerous, and such a terrible responsibility to bear, and now Zuko had let that power fall into the hands of someone like Rosan. 

Before either guard could recover, Zuko grabbed Sokka’s good elbow and dragged him on, up and around the corner. The stone corridor gave way to paneled wood, the dungeon to palace finery. He turned down the first branch they came upon, leading to a dead end holding only a bust of some long-forgotten scholar that marked the first in a trail of busts leading to the library. The panel in the wall behind the plinth swallowed them, showering their shoulders in a fine speckling of dust. 

To the pursuing guards, Zuko and Sokka vanished, like ghosts in the dark.

The passage dumped them in one of the ornamental flower gardens adjacent to the palace wall. Zuko took the wall at a run, climbed half-way, and reached down to pull Sokka up behind him. Below, the street was strangely quiet. 

“Where to now?” Sokka asked. He was slightly winded, leaning back against the wall to steady himself. 

Zuko hesitated. Behind them, the alarms were still silent—he was sure they had moments, at most, before the guards they’d encountered spread the word, and the whole palace was on alert.

He hadn’t… thought this far ahead. Now that Sokka was free, they needed to find somewhere safe to rest and regroup. Then he had to somehow explain what had happened, and decide what to do next. Where in Caldera City could they hide from the Fire Lord, and the army of imperial firebenders that would no doubt be looking for them within the hour? They couldn’t stay on the street. The guards at the harbor and the gates were surely on high alert from the assassination attempt. They couldn’t go to the Southern Water Tribe embassy, because that would be the first place they’d look once they learned that Sokka had escaped—

Sokka eased his hand out of Zuko’s grip. He hadn’t realized he was still holding it, a gesture too intimate for a stranger, but second nature to Zuko by now. It shouldn’t have felt like a rejection, but it still stung, and now Sokka was looking at him strangely. After an awkward moment he laid a hand on Zuko’s shoulder, reassuring. Zuko hadn’t realized how tense he was. He forced himself to relax.

“Okay,” Sokka said. “Okay, I have an idea. Follow me.”

Zuko nodded. 

He followed Sokka’s lead as they retraced the path Zuko had taken into the city. Just before they reached the street that would take him back to the city gates, Sokka turned off down an alleyway. The tense pedestrians he’d passed on his way inside the city were long gone, so that now only the night guard remained. Zuko eyed them from the shadows as they passed. They looked alert, but none of them were searching the streets with any real urgency. That wouldn’t last. They needed to get out of sight before the news of Sokka’s escape reached them. 

As though in agreement, Sokka darted across the road and ducked inside one of the buildings. He gestured for Zuko to follow, and the two of them crept quietly up the stairs to the top floor.

Without any better options, Zuko broke the lock again. He really ought to practice his lockpicking, for the next time he needed to run around smashing through his own citizens’ property. 

The lights inside the apartment were out. Zuko moved to flick a flame toward the lamp, remembered that he couldn’t, and dropped his hand again. He was pretty sure Sokka noticed, but he didn’t say anything, just moved to pull all the curtains tightly closed while Zuko dug through the drawers for a pair of spark rocks. It took him a moment to find them, buried in the bottom of a dusty drawer in the kitchen, so likely whoever lived here was a firebender. 

Sokka wedged a chair under the front door to secure the broken lock, then moved back to the window and pulled back the curtain just an inch to peer down into the street, checking one last time that they hadn’t been followed. Zuko cleared his throat, once the lamp was lit and the curtains were firmly shut.

“Whose apartment is this?” Zuko asked. 

Sokka whirled around to look at him. Zuko couldn’t tell if that look on his face was because he recognized his rescuer’s voice, or because he didn’t and had expected to. 

“The Fire Nation’s ambassador to the Southern Water Tribe,” Sokka said. “It was the first place I thought of. I just figured since he wasn’t due to come home for another few weeks, his apartment was probably empty. I don’t know how long we can stay. Maybe just the night.”

Zuko nodded. Once they realized that Sokka hadn’t fled the city, they’d start searching through anyone who might be associated with him. They were certain to start with the Southern Water Tribe Embassy, but if they were thorough they’d eventually work their way around to here, too. 

Sokka made a face, thinking of the ambassador. “He’s… probably going to have a bad time, pretty soon,” he said.

Zuko snorted, even though it wasn’t very funny. 

“Sannen tried to send a letter to your father,” he said. Sokka tensed. He’d seen the guards on the streets on the way over, too. No doubt he’d come to the same conclusions as Zuko had, that they were out there watching, looking for Sokka’s supposed conspirators. Zuko waved his hand quickly, dismissing his worry. “I told her to sneak the letter out tomorrow with one of the morning market vendors.”

“That’s… smart,” Sokka said. He just looked at him for a moment, with the sort of skeptical expression he wore when he was working his way through a too-favorable trade agreement, looking for the catch. “Not that I’m not grateful, but, uh. Who the fuck are you? And why are you helping me?”

Zuko opened his mouth beneath the mask. Closed it. Spirits, how was he even going to explain this?

“Promise me that you won’t freak out,” Zuko said at last. 

“That’s something people say _exclusively_ when there is a very good reason to freak out,” Sokka said. He tried to cross his arms, winced, and dropped them back to his sides, all without losing the deeply skeptical look on his face. “So no promises.”

That was… fair. And for Sokka, with all his stubborn insistence on science and reason above everything, this was going to be unbelievable no matter how he presented it. Hesitantly, Zuko took off the mask. A beat passed as Sokka stared at him, and then a vague look of recognition crossed his face. His eyes widened. 

Sokka’s sword was in his hands again so quickly, Zuko had hardly seen him grab for it. 

“Just let me explain—” Zuko said. He backed off a few steps, hands splayed in surrender, before Sokka decided it was time to redecorate the ambassador’s apartment. 

“What the _fuck_ are you doing here?” Sokka asked, incredulous and horrified all at once. “And—you helped me escape. Why? I told you I’m not a fucking Ozai sympathizer.”

Well, that answered the question of whether Sokka had ever met Rosan. So, that was just great. This would be… much easier with Aang, who actually entertained the idea of spirits meddling with the physical world, or Toph, with her lie detection, or really anyone other than his boyfriend and his knee jerk distrust of all things improbably magical. 

“I know you’re not. And I’m not who you think I am,” he said. He drew a bracing breath. “I’m Zuko.”

“Is that… supposed to be a joke?” Sokka asked.

“You know that man in the palace isn’t me,” he said. Sokka hesitated, while an odd mix of frustration and something closer to hurt flickered across his face. “You know he’s not. I would never have you arrested. I would never burn you.”

Sokka had no reason to believe him, of course he didn’t, but it made Zuko’s breath catch at how clearly Sokka wanted to agree with him, the little twist of uncertainty that turned his mouth down. Sokka’s hands readjusted on the hilt of his sword, just barely. He licked his lips. 

“This doesn’t make any _sense_ ,” Sokka said at last. “How the fuck could you be Zuko?”

“They attacked my caravan. Rosan did something to me, with this...” Zuko trailed off, unsure how to describe it. He formed a circle with his fingers, “...it was a marble… thing? But it was _creepy_ , and he said the spirits gave it to him—don’t give me that look,” he said, when Sokka made a face, “I know how you feel about spirits. Believe me, I’m not too happy with them right now, either.”

Sokka looked supremely unhappy, but he wasn’t stabbing him, so Zuko was going to cautiously take that as permission to continue explaining. 

“I think… the, uh, the marble thing, the boon from the Spirit World swapped my spirit with his, somehow. I don’t know. I was unconscious.” Zuko shook his head. “He took it with him. I think he planned to just pretend that he was me and infiltrate the palace that way, but he didn’t count on—on us.”

Sokka stared at him for a moment, fingers tense around the hilt of his sword. He took a shaky breath. 

“Prove it,” Sokka said, voice strangled. Zuko knew he hated this sort of thing, the Spirit World nonsense that seemed to follow him around much more than an average person. He knew he was a skeptic, but beneath the hysterical note to his voice he sounded so damn hopeful anyway that it made Zuko’s heart ache. “Prove to me that you’re Zuko.”

“Okay. Right,” Zuko said. “Well. I helped you break your dad out of the Boiling Rock. That was the first time we really talked, just the two of us. You told me that your girlfriend turned into the moon, and I said ‘that’s rough, buddy’, like an idiot.”

Sokka was still frowning. Zuko racked his brain for something else. 

“And… In those first few months after the war, before you were made ambassador, you sent me so many letters that when you broke your arm and had to take a break from writing, the postmaster came to see me personally just to ask if you were all right.” 

That had been embarrassing, mostly because Zuko was already tied up in knots about the missing letters, convinced that Sokka had gotten tired of him. It was also long before Zuko had realized that Sokka had feelings for him, though in hindsight, he had no idea how he hadn’t suspected. 

“These are old stories,” Sokka said faintly. “You could have heard them from someone else.”

“Something recent then,” Zuko said. “The night before I left. We were sitting in my chambers. You were reading a missive from one of the Earth Kingdom’s embassy staff, and your head was in my lap. They wanted your advice on reaching out to the Southern Water Tribe, because they were looking for a council person who might be interested in moving to Ba Sing Se. And you joked that you might take them up on it yourself, because then you could go spend time with Uncle every day, instead of just when he comes to visit the Fire Nation, and, uh, cut out the middleman,” he said, a smile tugging his lips at the joke. “And I said… I said I didn’t want you to go.” 

He met Sokka’s gaze. “And then I told you—I love you,” Zuko said. “No one else knows that, but us. I love you—”

The straight sword clattered to the ground, and Sokka threw his still shackled wrists behind Zuko’s head and dragged him forward into a hug. He sagged as the tension building in his shoulders swept out of him.

“I believe you,” he said, near breathless. Zuko huffed a laugh, his own relief dragging the sound out of him, and buried his face in his boyfriend’s neck. “Spirits, Zuko, you scared the hell out of me.”

“I’m sorry—”

“Don’t. Don’t be. Just—ugh. This is so weird,” Sokka murmured in his ear. Zuko couldn’t help but laugh again. 

It _was_ weird, but it was such a relief to have Sokka here and know he _believed_ him that Zuko didn’t even care. He didn’t know what he would have done, if Sokka hadn’t. All the fear and uncertainty of the last two days felt a little lighter with his face pressed into Sokka’s shoulder, and his arms curled loosely around his waist. 

He allowed himself a moment of weakness to just stand there in the middle of the room and be held. A part of him wanted to just stand here forever. Unfortunately, as much as he wanted to, practicality won out.

“...Are you hungry?” Zuko asked. 

He hadn’t eaten anything since yesterday, or maybe even longer than that, since he wasn’t quite sure how much time he’d lost while he was unconscious, and the only food he’d been offered had met an unfortunate end on the cellar floor. He doubted Sokka had eaten much today either. Sokka huffed, but let him go after another tight squeeze.

The ambassador’s pantry was mostly bare, since anything he might have left behind would have long since spoiled by now. There was rice in the cupboard, at least, and a few tightly sealed jars of spice on the shelf, and something that looked like it might be pickled radish-yams, floating in a wine colored brine. It was good enough for him. He added the ambassador to the list of people to pay back, once he was back in his own body. 

“So what now?” Sokka asked, leaning against the counter, while Zuko set the rice to cook on the stove. “Storm the palace and challenge him to an Agni Kai?”

“This body can’t firebend,” Zuko said absently. He struck the spark rocks together as though for emphasis, and the flame of the stove burner caught.

“You can’t— _fuck_ ,” Sokka said. “I was joking but, no, spirits, that’s... awesome. Great. We’re up against an extremely powerful firebender with absolutely no control or practice, who is probably hunting us down as we speak.” 

Sokka paced around the kitchen for a moment, then came back. “Cool. Fine. No wonder he looked like he didn’t know what he was doing when he attacked me, he’s fucking _making it up as he goes along_. That’s just—”

“Hey. Don’t spiral,” Zuko said, resting a hand on Sokka’s cheek. Sokka’s mouth snapped shut with an audible click. He huffed. 

“It’s—we’ll figure something out,” Zuko said, trying to sound reassuring. He hesitated a moment, glanced down to where Sokka was subconsciously hugging his elbow to his chest, and added, “Let me bandage your arm?”

One thing he could always rely on in the Fire Nation was an abundance of burn dressings and salve. Zuko found the ambassador’s first aid kit blanketed by a thin layer of dust under the vanity, but at least it was well stocked. 

They settled on the couch, Sokka sitting sideways with his manacled wrists in Zuko’s lap while Zuko poked at the lock with a bit of wire. His right elbow was propped up a little, to keep the pressure off his arm. Zuko tried to be gentle, but he was clumsy and out of practice with lockpicking. What he wouldn’t give to have Toph here right now. She’d have the manacles off before either of them could blink. As it was, it took him several minutes of trying and failing before the mechanism finally clicked open. Sokka shook the manacles off, and they thudded dully on the floor.

When Sokka turned his burned arm over for him to get a closer look, Zuko winced in sympathy. The skin was already a raw pink, blistering on the edges. Zuko knew Sokka wouldn’t blame him, but even if he hadn’t been the one to burn him, he couldn’t ignore the fact that it was his own carelessness that had gotten Sokka into this situation in the first place. 

He was as gentle as he could be, but even with the numbing effect of the salve, he knew how painful a burn could be. This one wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been—he really, really didn’t want to think about how bad it could have been—but Zuko still remembered enough from tending his own burn to be extra careful.

Back then, still stubborn and angry and looking for something he could have some illusion of control over, Zuko had insisted on applying the salve and the bandages himself, with only a tiny hand mirror pinned between his knees. Granted, Zuko’s burn had been much more severe, and the motion of the ship and his own pain-clumsy fingers had only made the task harder, but even still, the phantom memory of that pain urged him to be extra gentle.

Sokka’s fingers were turning pale, bunched in the fabric of his prison-issue trousers, by the time Zuko had coated the burn and picked up the bandage. Zuko soothed his thumb over the back of Sokka’s hand, far away from the burn, in apology. 

The ambassador had a tin of willowbark tea for pain tucked in the bottom of the kit that he would brew in a moment. He should have thought of that, first. It was the _least_ he could do, when it had been Zuko’s own fire that—

“I knew it wasn’t you,” Sokka said. Zuko glanced up at him, and maybe he shouldn’t have been surprised by the gentle expression on Sokka’s face, or how easily he’d guessed what Zuko was thinking. “I mean, I knew something was wrong, at least. You were acting so different, I thought maybe you’d hit your head, or—something.”

“I’m sorry,” Zuko said. 

“It’s not your fault,” Sokka said, like he actually believed that was true. “Anyway, it—I was really worried. It seemed so unlike you. And then he got really angry when I, well, I guess I tried to press him, because I thought maybe you were hiding what was wrong.”

“He tried to pull rank on me, and when that didn’t work I guess he just gave up on trying to fake it, and attacked me,” Sokka said. “The guards wouldn’t listen.” Sokka shook his head ruefully. “And there I was in the dungeon, trying to figure out how I could get back in the palace to try to help him...”

Zuko was focusing on winding the bandages as gently as he could around Sokka’s forearm. “I let my guard down, and it put you in danger. It should never have gotten this far. And now the whole nation is at risk—”

“Now who’s spiraling?” Sokka poked him with his free hand, and then when Zuko taped off the bandage at the wrist, he pulled back his hand to flex his fingers, testing mobility. “He hasn’t done anything yet.” 

_Other than burn you, and throw you into the dungeons_ , Zuko kindly didn’t say. He stood with the tin of willowbark, and went to swap the cooked rice on the stove with a kettle.

“Do you know what they’re planning?” Sokka asked. 

“The way he was talking… I think they’re going to try to get Azula on their side. Or, put her on the throne, maybe. He seemed… kind of fanatical. I don’t think he’s just trying to steal the throne for himself. I think he genuinely believes he’s doing Agni’s will by getting me out of the way.”

Sokka was quiet for a moment. 

“Zuko,” he said at length. “Do you think that Azula…?” 

Sokka trailed off, either not sure how to finish the thought, or not sure he wanted to tempt fate by saying it aloud. Zuko sighed harshly, and roughly scraped the rice into two bowls.

How would Azula react? She’d been doing so much better lately. It wasn’t like she was a prisoner. Her estate was just outside of Caldera in their grandmother’s—their mother’s mother’s—old home, and she had land and servants just as she would have in the palace, albeit only the distinctly battle-hardened sort for now, for their own protection as much as hers. But lately she could come and go as she pleased, and Zuko hadn’t had to replace any summarily banished staff in weeks. That she stayed in the estate was her own choice, even if Zuko got the distinct impression that some of his advisors thought he was keeping her there, and approved.

They’d been talking about wanting to see each other more, or at least, Zuko had, and Azula had pretended to not be interested, but he’d seen the way she’d smiled and rolled her eyes when she thought he wasn’t looking… 

But then he thought of how desperately she’d fought for the throne, and how many years she’d spent under their father’s thumb, and he thought—what would she do, if someone came to her and offered to put everything back the way it was? _He’d_ been changing for the better, too, back in Ba Sing Se, during the war, and he’d thrown all of that away the instant he’d been given the chance, before he’d fully realized that he wasn’t that person anymore— 

He didn’t think that Azula was that person anymore, either, but… some triggers were hard to predict, and some habits hard to shake. 

“I don’t know,” Zuko said honestly, and the admission rolled uncomfortably in his gut. “I think—I have to go check on her.” 

Sokka nodded, like that was never even a question. 

“We’ll go tomorrow,” Sokka said. “Of course I’m coming,” he added quickly, before Zuko could even think to protest. “Someone needs to be there to save you when she zaps you with lightning.”

“She’s not going to zap me with lighting,” Zuko said. 

“She might,” Sokka said. He patted him gently on the arm. “Maybe just a little. We’ll find out tomorrow.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One more chapter to go! It's mostly finished, just in need of a few finishing touches and some polishing :)


	3. A New Leaf

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We stan one (1) prodigy child. Somehow she stole the show. 
> 
> (Please heed the “Graphic depictions of violence” warning. Fire kills people.)

Even without his firebending, Zuko was an early riser. He woke Sokka in the blue hours of the morning, with the first light of dawn leaking through the cracks in the curtains. The ambassador’s bed wasn’t small, but every bed was tiny compared to the one in the Fire Lord’s chambers, and Sokka was making a strong effort to take over the entire surface. 

His burned and bandaged arm was tucked between their sides protectively. After yesterday, Zuko wanted nothing more than to let him sleep, but they’d agreed they shouldn’t stay in one place too long. Rather than trying to extract himself from Sokka’s halfway-sprawl over him, Zuko brushed his fingers through his hair, down his jaw, to wake him gently. Sokka hummed a little, a sleepy smile turning up the corners of his lips. He cracked an eye and—tensed, just for a moment, when he saw his face. Zuko drew his hand back guiltily, but by then Sokka had already come fully awake and relaxed again. He pressed a kiss to Zuko’s borrowed hand like an apology.

“We should get going,” Zuko said, while Sokka sighed and pressed his face between Zuko’s shoulder and the mattress. It took only moments to gather their meager belongings, and then they were following the quiet alleyways of the early morning toward the city walls.

They avoided the gates. The lines of travellers queuing up to be let through stretched on for blocks, and so the guards must have set up more checkpoints at the gatehouses overnight. Even if they had managed to make it out of the dungeons without running into the guards, it would have been wishful thinking to hope that they wouldn’t react to Sokka’s escape with tighter security. Zuko only hoped that Sannen wouldn’t be caught sending her message, that Aang would be cautious when he saw it, and most of all that Rosan wouldn’t do anything rash.

Despite the show of force at the gates, they slipped over a stretch of wall, perfectly in sync, and climbed almost too easily down the other side. It made him tense, like he was waiting for the other shoe to drop as they left Caldera City behind them. He reasoned that maybe Rosan didn’t see Sokka as a serious threat and didn’t care if he escaped. The more concerning option was that whatever they were planning, Rosan thought it too late to stop him.

Zuko clung to the hope that they may not have gotten to Azula yet for the duration of the walk to her estate. It took most of the morning, avoiding the main road where they could, careful not to let any of the early-morning travelers notice them lest they carry the news to the guarded gates. His careful attention on the road was why it took so long for Zuko to notice the heavy curl of smoke peeking out between the trees. 

The gate hung half-open, creaking faintly with the breeze. He tried to shake the feeling of walking into a spider cat’s web as they pushed their way inside. 

The courtyard was a charred mess. He could see now where the smoke was coming from, wafting off the smouldering remains of a truly brutalized topiary. And all around them, across the lawn and up the walkway leading up to the shattered remains of the estates front door, the blackened and smouldering lumps of…

Bodies.

He walked as though dazed, eyes raking over them all. The air felt too hot, too tight in his throat, and the smell alone was like something from the worst of his nightmares. He had to force himself to breathe through his mouth and not choke on the ashy-sweet taste on his tongue. 

“Zuko,” Sokka said softly. He turned, and he saw that Sokka was crouched over—

Zuko’s heart stuttered, anxiety clawed its way up his throat. 

Sokka was crouched over a woman. Black hair. One hand curled, blackened and burned. Zuko’s feet carried him across the courtyard, step-by-step, toward the woman and the gut-churning smell of burnt fat. And Zuko forced himself to look—

Sokka turned her over, and he saw her face. 

It wasn’t her. 

Zuko breathed. Of course it wasn’t her. Azula was always the one who could take care of herself, he should have known that. He _did_ know that. Only, for a moment... 

“Hey,” Sokka said. Zuko jumped at the sudden touch to his hand, sucked in another choking breath. His stomach turned, but closer now, he could see why Sokka had stopped, why he was glaring so darkly at the corpse. 

The familiar face of one of his council women stared vacantly between them. Not a week ago, they had both sat across from her, arguing policy. She had voted in his favor, if he remembered, even as she was plotting to overthrow him. Sokka grabbed his wrist. This time, he didn’t flinch. 

“You okay?” Sokka asked. Zuko nodded, and let Sokka pull him to standing. He added, “Because you’re looking a little green.”

“I’m fine,” Zuko promised. “Let’s find Azula.” 

Sokka nodded slowly, and cast another slow look around the courtyard. Now that Zuko was looking as well, he could pick out a few familiar faces, some even from the palace, although he couldn’t place them all. It was easier to pick out the faces of Azula’s staff. There were fewer of them than he’d expected, just one guard and the doorman that Zuko could see. Whether that meant that the rest had time to run, or that they’d had warning that Ozai’s supporters were coming, he had no way to know. Guilt stabbed at him anyway. 

They found Azula in the sitting room, a cup of tea steaming on the table in front of her. In the chair beside her sat a trembling servant. She looked young, barely old enough to work, still a bit gangly-limbed and carrying baby fat in her cheeks. The edge of her robe was slightly discolored by a high heat, and she looked very disheveled compared to Azula’s perfectly pressed outfit. The girl was clutching her own teacup like a vice, white-knuckled, and listening very intently to whatever Azula was saying to her. There was no kettle in sight, but of course, Azula wouldn’t need one. 

His sister was still here, and she was okay. Relief rushed through Zuko at the sight of her. The slightly-blackened floor creaked beneath their boots as they entered the room, and the girl flinched like he’d lit a firecracker.

“Oh, they’ve sent another one,” Azula said. There was something a little like delight on her face, but it masked a hard edge underneath. She glanced over at the frozen girl.

“Why don’t you leave us for a moment?” she said. The girl was still holding her teacup as she scurried to comply, and Azula watched her go as though she was simply stepping out on an errand. “This won’t take long.” 

“Azula,” Zuko said warily. Azula sniffed dismissively and flapped her hand at him. She stepped casually around the low table, and the unidentifiable charcoal stain beside it. 

“Oh, save the whole spiel. I’ll tell you the same thing I told your friends,” she said. “I’m not interested. Haven’t you heard? I’m turning over a new leaf.” She paused, glanced down at the floor like it was scattered with rubbish and not bodies. “Ah, well. Maybe you haven’t heard. I suppose I could have let one go...”

Azula shook her head as though to rid herself of such a silly thought. She sighed overdramatically, all nonchalant, _Well, what’s a girl to do?_ Then she took a firebender’s stance, fingers pointed, and circled her arms. 

“ _Wait!_ ” Zuko and Sokka shouted at the same time. Azula gave them a look, as though offended by the interruption. Then she raised an eyebrow when she noticed that Zuko wasn’t alone, and for a very brief moment real surprise crept into her expression as she recognized Sokka. He was clearly out of place next to an Ozai sympathizer, and though she hid her curiosity quickly, it was enough to make her pause. 

“I’m not with them,” Zuko said. He stood very still, feeling a bit like a sparrow-mouse being circled by a hawk, and very aware that if she threw lightning at him, there was no way for him to redirect it. “It’s—complicated, but you have to believe me. I’m Zuko!”

She made a face at him, looking a little insulted. “I’m not _that_ crazy.”

“You’re not crazy at all,” Zuko said unhappily, because he couldn’t help himself. She could be frustratingly self-deprecating for how boastful she was, always saying things like that, _I’m crazy_ and _I’m a monster_ , and looking genuinely nonplussed when Zuko tried to correct her. As expected, Azula snorted at him, but by the little flick of her gaze, she seemed caught off guard by his words. In a good way, he hoped. 

She hummed thoughtfully and let the sparks dissipate, then flicked her hands as though to shake some life back into them. She looked supremely distrustful, and… he didn’t like the way she was looking at Sokka, with the sort of glint in her eye that meant she was thinking a little too seriously about something. It was the sort of look Zuko had been well acquainted with as a child, and the fact that she was aiming it at Sokka not long after he’d supposedly tried to kill her brother made Zuko… tense. Heartbeat fluttering, Zuko stepped very slightly in front of Sokka, hoping she wouldn’t notice. She did, of course. 

“I have to say, this is a bold strategy,” Azula said. “It does fit my brother’s kind of stupid, though. Especially bringing him here,” she added, gesturing at Sokka. “Last I heard, you were giving poor Zuzu the royal treatment.”

“They told you that?” Zuko asked. Azula shrugged. “Did you believe them?”

“I’ll admit I was… skeptical,” she said. “I mean, stabbing Zuzu in his sleep? It’s all a bit… common, isn’t it?” She shook her head, like the selected method of assassination was the real problem with the story. “But seeing as you’re running around with a known traitor now, well… I really don’t know what to think.”

“I’m not a traitor, I’m just… in a traitor’s body,” Zuko said, fully aware of how absurd it sounded. “I really am Zuko. I can—prove it to you?”

“Make it good,” Azula said. 

“The last time I visited,” Zuko said. “We sat on your balcony and drank some of the white tea blend that Uncle sent you. You told me it was disgusting, and then you finished a whole pot by yourself.”

Azula was watching him curiously, head tilted to the side. She was staring at him like a predator watching its prey, daring it to show itself in the dense brush, waiting for a moment to snatch it up. 

“I asked you if you wanted to come live in the palace with me, since you’ve been doing better,” Zuko continued. “You wanted to know if my boyfriend had agreed—”

“That’s not what I said,” Azula interrupted sharply. Zuko sighed. 

“He’s not a concubine, Azula,” Zuko said. Sokka made an indignant noise, which they both ignored. She smirked just slightly. He wasn’t certain if it was because she was amused by his protest, or because he’d passed her test. 

“Then I told you it was his idea,” Zuko continued, “and you told me you’d think about it.”

“Hm,” Azula said. “Maybe you are Zuzu. I’m still not sure why you’re here, though.”

“I just wanted to make sure you were all right,” Zuko said, which earned him an eyeroll and a muttered _as if they were ever a threat to me_. He didn’t mention that it wasn’t the physical threat that had him worried. “I don’t know what they’ll do, now that they know they can’t get you on their side—”

“Oh, Zuzu, they weren’t here for me,” Azula said. “I mean, they were. I’m an incredibly talented firebender, and they all know it.”

She was picking at her nails with an exaggerated lack of care. When they were younger, Zuko would have taken her comment as an attempt to gloat, or even as a threat, but now he could see the anxiety hidden behind that carefully manicured disinterest. Something was bothering her.

“What did they want?” Zuko asked. 

“They kept asking me where Father was being held,” she said. “As if I’d know. Or care. And I told them it was pointless, and that the Avatar really did take away his bending, but… they didn’t seem too concerned.” 

And there, that was what had her questioning. She, both of them, knew that they had nothing to fear from their father anymore, not when he was no longer able to firebend, except—

Zuko turned to meet Sokka’s equally horrified gaze. Azula’s narrowed eyes flickered between their faces, sharp as a knife.

They weren’t trying to put Azula on the throne. No, that wouldn’t solve anything, with the Avatar and the Fire Nation both so obviously supporting Zuko. There was a non-bender in Zuko’s fire bending body, and they were looking for his father, with a boon from the Spirit World that could pull the spirit right out of someone—

“How did you end up in that body, Zuzu?” Azula asked, casual as thin ice cracking beneath your boots. “And where is your body now?”

“We need to get back to the palace,” Sokka said, echoing the thought in Zuko’s mind. If they were looking for his father, they must have already realized that he wasn’t being kept in the palace dungeons. There had been too many assassination attempts, too many attempted coups, and they and Aang and a few of his more trusted advisors had agreed to move him somewhere secret. 

But it wouldn’t be difficult for Rosan to learn the location, if he was clever enough, and then it would be a short flight by airship before it was too late to stop him. 

Sannen had only sent out her letters this morning, if she’d even managed to do so without being caught. If they waited for Aang, they might be too late. 

“I’m coming with you, of course,” Azula said. 

“You don’t have to,” Zuko said. 

“I’m sorry,” she said. “You have another firebender who can hold her own against the Fire Lord in mind?” She waited approximately half a second before whirling and marching off. “I didn’t think so. I’m coming.”

They found the trembling girl in the kitchen, looking simultaneously alarmed and deeply relieved that there had been no more fighting. 

“Go home,” Azula said shortly. “Take tomorrow off. I’ll send for you once it’s safe to return.” 

The girl did not need to be told twice. Zuko was fairly certain that if that girl didn’t catch the next ship to the Earth Kingdom never to return, she would be a loyal servant for life. Azula dusted her hands and then led them back through the kitchen into the backyard of the estate. 

There were more bodies here. More small fires burning, too, that she snuffed with a gesture as she passed on the way to the stables.

“We’ll take a komodo rhino carriage,” she said. She shoved the stable door open with her foot and gestured them both forward. “It’ll be faster. Now, call me a perfectionist, but I do have to ask: what’s your plan, if we’re too late? Because I can’t say I’m very eager for a family reunion.”

There was a drawn pause. Azula looked unimpressed. 

“Aang defeated him once,” Sokka said finally. 

“The Avatar _spared_ him, once,” Azula said. She climbed into the front of the waiting carriage, and they clambored after her. She cut them both a look of pure derision. “And that was when he wasn’t wearing his friend’s face.” 

She glanced between them both, and then with a snap of the reins, they jerked forward. “Well, let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” she said.

Even from a distance, they could see that the palace’s private airfield was buzzing with activity. Zuko followed the line of men with his gaze. They definitely had enough crew to man the small airship that was kept for the Fire Lord’s personal use, but there was no smoke coming from the exhaust pipes along the side of the ship, so the burners must all still be cold. The airship was still refueling. Zuko's relief hit him in a rush. They hadn't missed them. They still had time.

The Fire Lord’s airfield was, in theory, heavily guarded and difficult to access, sequestered alongside the palace grounds with one carefully protected gate for entry. They abandoned the carriage and made their way closer on foot. Maybe Zuko should have known better, but when he and Sokka crept quietly toward the tower and Azula followed them without complaint or comment, he _thought_ it was clear what the plan was. 

And then Azula fists erupted into twin jets of blue flame, and Sokka had half a second to squawk indignantly and grab for her before she’d trust forward with all her might. The front gates exploded open, a wash of blue fire pouring out over the concrete.

“Azula! We’re sneaking!” Sokka hissed.

“ _You’re_ sneaking,” she corrected him.

“Let it go, Sokka,” Zuko said, because he looked like he was gearing himself up to argue with her. Already Zuko could hear the airship dock workers shouting in surprise. The gatehouse doors burst open, and a streak of flame shot over their heads as the imperial firebenders at the airship turned to stop them. 

Sokka ducked below a spear of flame, stepped in and took down the first man in the line. Azula hardly paid them any attention, striding forward toward the middle of the tarmac. She swept a stray bolt from the air and sent it back the way it had come with deadly efficiency.

It was not difficult to pick out his body among them, standing poised before the airship ramp in his royal armor, Fire Lord's crown glinting harshly in the light. 

“Maybe I should have killed you after all,” Rosan said, when his gaze fell on Zuko. He half-turned to the guards flanking him, and with a short gesture and a quiet word they fanned out around the airship, blocking their approach. “Although you really are making it too easy for me. Three traitors attacking the Fire Lord in his own palace?” He clicked his tongue. “No one will even be surprised, when His Majesty expects the Water Tribes to answer for it—”

Zuko drew his dao in one furious movement. In the same moment, Sokka snatched his wrist, dragging him back. 

“Don’t let him bait you,” Sokka reminded him. “We need to stop the ship. He can’t do anything if he can’t leave the palace.” Zuko clenched his teeth. He knew Sokka was right. Rosan likely knew it, too, or he wouldn’t have ordered his men to guard the airship, but he knew exactly how to get under his skin, threatening another war, and with the Southern Water Tribe in the crosshairs. At some point, Azula had subtly moved in front of them, like she didn’t quite trust Zuko not to charge forward, but didn’t want to be obvious about it. 

“I’ll admit, Princess, I had higher hopes for you,” Rosan said. “Fire Lord Ozai might have been able to look past your failure during Sozin’s Comet, but he won’t forgive a traitor.” There was a malicious curl to his lip, exuding arrogance. “I’m sorry it has to end this way.”

On instinct Zuko brought both blades forward defensively, but it wasn’t necessary. Rosan sent out a wide whip of flame, and Azula stepped into the attack immediately with a burst of her own fire. They met in the middle, and for a moment Zuko’s view was cut off as they crashed together.

"This is making me a bit nostalgic," Azula said. She turned her palm to the sky, and the wall of flames climbed higher. Only then did Azula turn her head back to look at them.

It did sort of resemble their final Agni Kai, albeit this time it seemed that Zuko, or at least his body, was the one that was lacking control. Azula tilted her head, thought about it for a moment. "I think I'm counting it, if we're still keeping score," she said.

Zuko laughed. "If you can beat him, we'll call ourselves tied.”

“We’ll call it what it is, which is two to zero,” Azula said. She thrust forward with her other hand, and the wall of flame collapsed. On the other side of the field, Rosan staggered to deflect the wash of heat from her fire, “since the water tribe girl had to clean up after you, last time."

"I'm not sure that counts," Zuko called after her, but she pretended not to hear him. 

Rosan's flames were not like Zuko's. They were a raw and viscous burning, they were angry in a way Zuko hadn't drawn from in a long time. He was reckless, and undisciplined, and Zuko could feel the searing heat of two walls of flame clashing together in a tremendous wave. Unprovoked, Rosan set a jet of flame toward him, and Zuko ducked and rolled aside at the same time that Azula stepped in and split through the flames like a knife. 

“Be careful, Azula,” Zuko said.

“Worry about yourself, Zuzu,” she replied.

Sokka grabbed his wrist and tugged him toward the ship. The fuel tank was backed up against the tail, where a line ran from the tank to the engine room. These airships weren’t like the war balloons that could fly on a firebender’s power alone. They were more efficient, using firebenders to regulate the burners, but that meant that they needed fuel to get underway.

“We need to disconnect the fuel line,” Sokka said, with the sort of confidence that Zuko hoped meant he… actually knew how to do that. “Cover for me?” He just nodded, and let Sokka lead the way. 

They could just reach the tank from the edge of the catwalk attaching the loading ramp to the ship’s underbelly. Zuko squared off with his back to the fuel tank while Sokka wedged his sword into one of the spokes on the valve, using the length of it like a lever. It took his whole body weight to turn it, and the whole tank made a strange creaking sound as the pressure inside changed.

“I’ll be quick,” Sokka said, and then he was leaping off the side of the ramp to hook his fingers over the edge of the tank. He scaled up the side without so much as a ladder, leaving Zuko to deal with the firebenders alone. 

Except… the firebenders didn’t seem to be coming. Zuko disarmed three non-benders of their swords without much effort, and turned and looked down the walkway expecting flames, and… nothing. 

They were afraid to firebend so close to the tank, Zuko realized. He could see how a couple of them were slightly too far back, not quite in the tight formation they were trained for, tense and wary of every ember. He pressed that advantage, targeted where their line was weakest. The ramp was narrow, the catwalks narrower, so that they were forced to come at him in pairs or groups of three at most. 

Zuko heard what he thought was triumphant crowing from the top of the tank, which was all the warning he got before Sokka leapt the whole distance from the tank to the loading ramp. The ramp rocked dangerously under the weight of his landing, knocking several of the men sideways over the edge, and very nearly Zuko as well, were it not for Sokka’s hand grabbing for his bicep and pulling him back. They followed the fallen men down, with Zuko covering the right and Sokka the left as they came off of the ramp and back onto solid ground. 

"Back up, Zuko," Sokka warned. He turned and saw—oh, he was definitely too close, and he barely managed to dodge back as a lance of fire shot between him and Sokka, leaving a scorched streak on the ground. He was used to being able to deflect the flames. It had been a long time since he'd fought seriously against firebending opponents using only his dao. He should probably train more with a live opponent, and not just sparring with Sokka, but sparring with other firebenders, too.

Well, he'd cross that bridge if he lived to see it.

Another javelin of flame cut the air next to him, still too close, and the imperial firebender in front of him darted forward while he was off balance. He cuffed Zuko hard on his shoulder with a searingly hot bolt of flame, and the pain made him flinch and fumble one of his swords. It clattered on the ground, and Zuko grit his teeth and aimed a vicious kick for the man's knee before he could right himself. Sokka shouldered his way between them before the man could recover, breaking them apart and earning Zuko some space.

Sokka jumped over a low kick, spun and planted a boot in one of the firebender's chests. He staggered back, unprepared for the blow, paying too much attention to Sokka's blade and not enough to his stance.

Another flame took the firebender clean off his feet, sending him tumbling backwards into the man behind him. For a moment Zuko thought it was Azula, but no, the flame wasn't blue. He turned just in time to see Rosan aim another punch in his direction, and this one went wide too, but just barely, so that the heat stung against the already raw skin on Zuko's shoulder.

People had told him that he resembled his father before, not that anyone had dared to recently, but Zuko had never seen that resemblance more clearly than when Rosan turned that cruel smirk on him.

 _He's still trying to kill me,_ he thought hysterically, because, what a moron, Azula was right there and he'd taken his eyes off of her just to attack Zuko—

"Don't kill my body!" Zuko shouted, just in time for Azula to roll her eyes and pull her aim down, and for his body to flinch. She scythed forward and swept toward his legs with an arc of flame. Rosan tripped, went down on his shoulder, and rolled. He spun and kicked up a tornado of flames that cast off a searing column of heat and smoke. The heat coming off of him was enough to stagger even Azula, although she hardly showed it, arm thrown up in front of her face, body angled just slightly to pull the heat off the wave of fire rushing outward toward Zuko and Sokka. 

Rosan saw the opening in her stance immediately, and swept both arms forward to unleash a wave of fire in her direction. She braced herself for it in the last moment, and with the raw and reckless heat of it, and the way she’d been angled toward Zuko and Sokka to deflect his last blow, she didn’t have time to counterattack before he battered her with another heavy strike. 

When Zuko had fought Azula, she’d exploited his desire to protect Katara. Rosan was going to do the same. He’d keep attacking them and force Azula to either protect them until she slipped up, or to let them burn. Azula cut him a glare, as though the same thought had crossed her mind. 

Then, her gaze flicked away from Zuko, just for a moment, and away from Rosan, even as she swept her arms out to throw another blistering wall of fire between them and Rosan’s increasingly desperate strikes. 

If she was taking her eyes off her opponent it was for a reason. Azula, he knew, was not the sort of person to be backed into a corner. 

Zuko followed her line of sight to the airship, to the _fuel tank_ , and he swore. She had that look in her eye, that tactical sort of squint that meant she’d run the risks and decided it was worth it. The lightning arced between Azula’s hands, hair flying wild as static pooled around her fingertips. Zuko didn’t think, he just spun around, found Sokka, and stepped between him and the airship. The lighting sparked from Azula’s fingertips as she circled her arms and pointed and breathed, and Zuko didn’t _think_ , just _moved_ , because if he had thought he might have remembered, as he threw his arms like he’d done a thousand times before, and tried to carve a shield of flame between them and the ship—

—this body couldn’t firebend. 

(Shit.)

The explosion was deafening. Zuko struck the tarmac, starbursts streaking across his vision. The heat, the pressure, slammed over him. 

(Shouldn't it be hotter?)

He blinked, tried to focus. The smouldering airship was a beacon of towering flame, the airfield was alight with it, casting long shadows off prone bodies. A few dying wisps of blue flame licked the ground between him and the remains of the ship, then snuffed out. He groaned, and even that was enough to choke him, the sharp agony of broken ribs. Zuko groped behind him, and found Sokka. His leg was… wrong, bent wrong, and he was—unconscious, but he’d be okay, he had to be, because... 

Throat tight, he pressed his hand to Sokka’s slack cheek and felt the heat of his breath on his hand. Zuko squeezed his eyes shut and sighed, then turned, because he still needed to find—

Azula straightened her robes casually and swept the flyaway hairs from her face. She was the only one on her feet, and she looked supremely pleased about it. 

She leaned down over Zuko’s body, palm flat on his chest while she rifled around in his robe pocket. She found the boon in moments, and batted Rosan’s feeble attempts to take it back from her away easily. She crouched there for a moment, with the boon’s black glow cast on her face. She stared. 

Zuko’s heart caught in his throat, seeing the shadow of some dark thought cross her face. She glanced down at Zuko’s body again. 

Then Azula blinked, and turned and looked him right in the eye, like she had somehow felt his gaze on her. A silent moment passed, where they both knew what she’d just been considering, and stared at each other helplessly as they both mulled it over. 

(And he thought—no. No, Zuko _knew_ she wouldn’t. 

He wasn’t quite sure that _Azula_ knew.)

But then like some shadow passing away, she shook her head. She stood, dropped the boon, and crushed it beneath her boot heel. 

Everything tilted. Zuko gasped, or tried to gasp, but it was like choking on thick smoke, like a weight crushing down on his chest. He blinked at Azula, and he watched her from across the tarmac, and he watched her as she loomed over him, looking down with mirthless smirk. His heart was thundering, his ears were ringing so loud he could hardly hear her when she opened her mouth. 

“Don’t you have any faith in me, Zuzu?” Azula asked, simultaneously sounding close and far away.

“Of course I do,” he said, without hesitation, and it seemed to come from both his and Rosan’s mouth at once. 

Azula made a face at him, at the raw honesty of it. She twitched as though to reach out, then stopped herself. 

“Well, that’s just embarrassing,” she said, as Zuko’s vision pinched and narrowed and the sound of her voice went strangely muffled, and with the very last thread of consciousness he felt her pat his knee and whisper, “Let’s keep that between us...”

Azula had settled on the grass by the pond, with her hands resting palm-up on her knees, eyes serenely closed. She looked good in her royal robes… content in a way that Zuko hadn’t seen in a long time. At some point between when Sokka had started sketching her and when Zuko had looked away, the turtleduck hatchlings had crept out of the brush to peck around her ankles with interest. They were getting a little too used to being fed kitchen scraps, and Azula had unwittingly chosen a prime seat to make them believe she was going to feed them. 

She didn’t feed them, but she didn’t shoo them away either. Zuko watched Sokka trace another very un-turtleduck-like blob onto the page as another ball of fluff attempted to climb into her open palm. Katara had healed the burn on Sokka’ arm, so that only a faint pinkness remained. The rest of him had been in worse shape when she’d found them, and Zuko had stubbornly insisted Katara treat him first, once he was awake enough to protest.

Aang and Katara had arrived too late to help, as he’d known they would, but just in time to be very confused by the mayhem waiting for them in the palace and still faintly smouldering airfield. Not that Zuko remembered any of the intervening moments between lying on the tarmac with Azula crouched over him, and waking in his too-soft bed. They hadn’t even needed the letter to the air temple—the gossip about Sokka’s arrest had traveled faster.

Zuko had a strong suspicion that the people were… skeptical about the official story they’d gone with, that Sokka’s arrest had been part of a ruse to lure more of Ozai’s sympathizers from hiding. Or rather, they’d been skeptical for all of about an hour, at which point the more pressing gossip, that the Fire Lord was seeing someone, and that someone was the Water Tribe Ambassador, had swept from the mouths of the servants into the streets like a wildfire.

(His advisors were less than pleased with that one, but then… Zuko really couldn’t bring himself to care. If anything, the last few days felt like a sign from the spirits to tell the whole world, and who was he to disagree?)

Zuko settled next to Sokka in the grass and peeled back his outer robe. His whole back was a mess of black and blue where Rosan had hit the tarmac after the explosion, and his shoulder was stiff from him landing on it wrong. Raw, red burns spotted his arms from Rosan’s lack of control. His fingers had been the worst off, blistered and cracking at the joints. Katara had dealt with those first, until his hands only ached dully, still a little pinkish where the worst of the damage had been. 

Katara made a small noise as he shed the last layer, and she finally got a good look at the state of him. Zuko huffed. If he’d been the one responsible for the injuries, he might have bitten his tongue. As it was, he was mulishly annoyed that Rosan had returned his body in such terrible shape. 

“You’re supposed to be a master firebender,” Katara said, with the sort of forced lightness in her voice that told him that his back was an absolute mess. He glanced over his shoulder, and saw the way her expression pinched before she caught him looking. She raised an eyebrow at him, but her hands were beyond gentle as she bended the water over his shoulder. “How did you get so many burns?” 

“They’re not my fault,” Zuko said. “I wasn’t even in my body at the time. Besides, it would have been much worse—”

“Oh sure, could be worse. At least you weren’t shot with lightning this time,” Katara said. Beside the pond, Azula’s lips twitched, barely, into a smirk. Zuko huffed.

“Sokka broke his leg again,” he said accusingly. Sokka squawked in outrage, and Zuko very pointedly ignored the abject betrayal on his boyfriend’s face as he threw him to the armadillo-wolves. “Why aren’t you giving _him_ a hard time?”

“ _I_ did not break my leg,” Sokka said. “ _You_ broke my leg, when you slammed into me after you tried to be all heroic and catch an explosion with your bare, non-bending hands.”

“I didn’t think—”

“Oh, I definitely noticed that part—”

“Boys, boys, you’re both stupid,” Azula said, cracking an eye.

“An interesting stance,” Sokka said cheerfully, “considering your big plan... was to cause a massive explosion that almost killed us.”

“Oh, please. What’s a little explosion going to do?” Azula asked. “You people are like rat-roaches. I couldn’t get rid of you if I tried.”

Zuko knew very well that she’d done just the opposite, throwing up a wall of blue flame at the last moment, siphoning some of the heat and fire off the explosion as it came their way, and redirecting it to soften the impact. He’d seen those dying blue wisps skittering across the asphalt through the smoke. They had been much too close for their relatively minor injuries to make sense, otherwise. He thought Sokka probably had noticed as well, because he snorted and shook his head, earning him a suspicious glare from Azula. 

On the other end of the grounds, Appa shifted, lowing grumpily as Aang loaded the last of his supplies into his saddle. Aang had already scraped up the crushed remains of the boon that had caused this. He looked skeptical of its usefulness, but they’d agreed that any spirit handing out powerful artifacts to unstable humans needed at least a token visit from the Avatar, to understand it’s intentions, and warn it away from further meddling. 

But Aang’s job bridging the mortal and Spirit Worlds would have to wait. The letters Sannen had sent were probably still in transit, even if they’d been sent with urgency. They’d decided that if Aang and Appa left right away, they may be able to beat the messenger to the South Pole, and explain what had happened before they could cause any more of an incident than they already had. 

Aang dusted his hands, then hopped off Appa’s back, clearing the courtyard in one light-footed jump. He landed near silently in the grass next to Azula, who paid him no mind. He sighed heavily and stretched out his shoulders. 

“We can start a minor war with the Southern Water Tribe, right?” Aang said lightly. “Just a baby one. We can stop it tomorrow instead, and then I can sleep in a real bed and eat real food today.”

“Oh, Avatar, bringer of peace and harmony, your work is never done,” Katara said blithely. She had no sympathy for him, able to avoid traveling again so soon by virtue of them needing her healing expertise here. “You can come pick me up when you’re done at the South Pole.”

Aang put his hands on his hips and looked between Zuko and Sokka for a moment. He smiled. “I’m telling Chief Hakoda to expect a visit from you two soon,” he said. 

“Fair,” Sokka said. Zuko was sure that after all of this, they’d owe him their own explanation in person, and more than just a brief visit. _Especially_ if they were going to tell him about their relationship in person, and not just let the rumor mill do its work. Maybe he could convince Uncle to come and cover for him for a few weeks, so that they could make it a proper visit. Or, well… he cut a quick glance at Azula, who was still pointedly pretending to ignore their conversation. Maybe he could ask someone else. 

Sokka’s tongue was poking out as he added the last little detail on the lump that Zuko assumed was supposed to represent the mother turtleduck, based on where he’d drawn it. He didn’t care how stupid fond his face was, or about the knowing, teasing look Katara was sending him, Zuko loved this man so much his chest ached with it. Sokka held his painting up for inspection, then set it down again to start inking out the trees. 

Without warning, Azula hopped to her feet. She plucked the paper right out of Sokka’s hands, so that his brush left a long black streak along the edge. She held it up, examining the sketch with the sort of gravity she might have given a war map, and tilted her head. 

“This is hideous,” she declared. She stared at it for another long moment. Then she flapped the page once more to let the ink dry, primly folded it in half, and tucked it into her robe.

“I’m going inside. Send for Ye Cheng, won’t you, brother?” Azula asked. “I’ll need my things. And I was very impressed by how she handled herself yesterday.”

Zuko frowned. The servant from her estate? “Azula, that girl was _terrified_ ,” he said. 

“I can mold her, Zuzu,” she said. He gave her another look, so she rolled her eyes. With the comment tossed over her shoulder on the way toward the door, like an afterthought, she added, “Fine. I can mold her, if she _wants_.”

With his masterpiece and muse both gone, Sokka set his brush down and leaned back in the grass with his now healing leg stretched out in front of him. Their hands brushed, just barely, and Zuko felt Sokka hesitate for a moment before he remembered that they weren’t a secret anymore. Then he stretched and laced their fingers together, out in the garden where anyone could see, as casual as if they’d done this a thousand times, and Zuko thought in that moment that his heart might be too big for his chest. 

Sokka smiled at him, one of those private looks Zuko cherished so much.

“You two are going to be insufferable, aren’t you?” Katara asked. Sokka grinned, fond and unashamed. 

“ _So_ insufferable,” he promised. Sokka tilted over, so he was leaning against Zuko’s side, and then in his lap. Zuko tried not to wince, because now that they didn’t have to be careful about being seen, he really, really didn’t want Sokka to move, bruises be damned. He brushed his fingers over the short fuzz at the back of Sokka’s head, just because he could. “We’re gonna be the worst, and it’ll be payback for all the gross lovey-dovey stuff you and Aang made us sit through...”

That was a lot of payback. Zuko brushed his thumb down Sokka’s neck, and Sokka’s teasing words trailed off when Zuko leaned down to kiss him. They’d better get started.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for the comments/kudos!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [In Spirit, In Flesh [Podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29224275) by [Rionaa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rionaa/pseuds/Rionaa)




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